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Thursday, July 30, 2015

With Lee In Virginia Review #hsreviews #heirloomstories

My girls and I love audio dramas. We mostly listen to them while we are on a road trip. We like to listen to them while we clean too, but sometimes we get distracted from what we are doing. We just listened to With Lee In Virginia from Heirloom Audio Productions and it is just as good as their first two audio dramas.

With Lee In Virginia, Under Drake's Flag, and In Freedom's Cause audio dramas are all based off of the G.A. Henty books with the same names. Heirloom Audio has done an amazing job at bringing these adventures to life for people of all ages.

We received the two disc audio drama cd plus the free 52 page study guide. The 2 1/2 hour adventure is recommended for ages 6-adult. There are some big names from Adventures in Odyssey, The Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, and Mom's Night Out that take part in this audio. Sean Astin, Brian Blessed, Chris Anthony, Kelsey Lansdowne, Kirk Cameron with one of his sons, and more. What happens when you put all these amazing voices together? You get an audio adventure that will take you back in time and make you feel like you are living it.

With Lee In Virginia takes us back in time to the Civil War when a fifteen-year-old named Vincent Wingfield joins the Army of Northern Virginia Cavalry. He soon finds himself fighting alongside famous Confederate generals. This is an audio drama that includes background noises to make you feel as if you are there. The characters really come alive and the voices feel like they fit the characters perfectly.

The beautiful study guide really adds a lot to the audio drama especially if you have a child that isn't familiar with this time in history. At the beginning there is a brief introduction to G.A. Henty, General Robert E. Lee and General Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson. There are three sections for each lesson that includes Listening Well questions to see if your child understood what was going on. Some of these are fairly simple. There is also a Thinking Further section, and this includes questions to help the student think, draw conclusions, and speculate. There isn't always a right or wrong answer to these questions, but they will help you understand the story better. Lastly there are defining words. The words are taken from the story and your child may or may not already know the definition. Each page of the study guide tells you what disc and track number to listen to before answering the questions which makes using this study guide very simple. There is also a bible study on duty, facts about the Civil War, and a map to trace the route that was traveled in the story.

We received our CD the day before we were going out of town. Which was perfect! The bad part was we were only on the road for an hour. When we reached our destination we did not want to get out of the car. Amber wanted to know why when we had a good story we didn't have very far to drive. We were all already looking forward to the drive home. Later we listened to the audio drama again and this time we answered the questions in the study guide. I like how some of the questions were very easy to answer to include my 10 year old, but there were others that got us all thinking about why things were happening in the story.

We have listened to With Lee In Virginia several times just during this review period and we will be listening to it often. My adult son read every G. A. Henty book as a boy and those are the only books he took with him when he left home. He is planning a big road trip in October and the girls wanted to send him all three of our Heirloom Audio Productions CDs so that he could listen to them while he is driving. After they thought about this for awhile they decided we should buy him his own copy because they don't want to take the chance of him loosing ours.